All this I thought, reminding myself of the savage birthright of Jan Klawer, Hottentot.
Klawer came the next morning. I asked what he thought of what I had told him. He was only a poor hotnot, he said. I was satisfied. I asked why my other men had not come to see me. He said they had come, but I had been too sick. I told him he lied. If they had come they would have been in my nightmares. I told him to try again. He said they were afraid of my sickness. I told him he was lying. Yes master, he said. I told him to try again. He said that the Hottentots had made them afraid of these huts (the huts across the stream). I glared until he squirmed and did a slave-shuffle.
What was wrong with me? I asked. Did I have the Hottentot sickness? He was sure I did not. The Hottentot sickness was for Hottentots. I would be up and about in a few days.
What had become of my wagon, my oxen, my horses? The wagon was standing where we had left it in the night, he could find his way back easily. But everything had been taken from it except patently useless items like the tarbucket. My cattle and horses were grazing with the Hottentots’ cattle.
I instructed him to bring my men with him when next he came. He bowed and backed out. His visit had exhausted me. I wished to return to my reveries but could not. I had fallen into an irritating spell of sobriety and anxiety. An eruption was forming on my left buttock an inch or so from my anus. Could this be a cancer? Did cancers grow in the buttocks? Or was it simply a gigantic pimple, an aftereffect of the unsavoury yellow soup that dribbled out of me? I had told Klawer to clean me, and he had done so, but only with a scrap of wool. Hottentots know nothing of soap and shun water to the extent of tying their prepuces shut while swimming. Hence the noxious smell of their women’s clefts.
Hourly I fingered the bubble in my flesh. I did not mind dying but I did not wish to die of a putrefying backside. I would gladly have expired in battle, stabbed to the heart, surrounded by mounds of fallen foes. I would have acceded to dying of fevers, wasted in body but on fire to the end with omnipotent fantasies. I might even have consented to die at the sacrificial stake: if the Hottentots had been a greater people, a people of ritual, if I had been held until moonrise and then led through rows of silent watchers to a stake where, bound by stone-faced priests, I underwent the Arcadian ordeal of losing toenails, toes, fingernails, fingers, nose, ears, eyes, tongue, and privates, the whole performance accompanied by howls of the purest anguish and climaxing in a formal disembowelling, I might, yes, I might have enjoyed it, I might have entered into the spirit of the thing, given myself to the ritual, become the sacrifice, and died with a feeling of having belonged to a satisfying aesthetic whole, if feelings are any longer possible at the end of such aesthetic wholes as these. But while it was conceivable that in a fit of boredom the Hottentots might club my brains out, it was unlikely that, lacking all religion and a fortiori all ritual, they would subject me to ritual sacrifice. Even a corpus of magic, as distinct from occasional superstitions, they did not have. Hottentots admit the existence of a Creator only because the effort of conceiving a universe without one is too strenuous for them. Why the Creation should consist of interspersed plena and vacua is a question which does not exercise them. God has his own life to live, with who knows what sorrows and gratifications, in his own place. Insofar as God uses his power foolishly one may joke about him. For the rest, the correct attitude is one of detachment. “I know, deprived of me, God could not live a wink; he must give up the ghost if into naught I sink”, sing the Hottentots.
I imagined the swelling in my buttock as a bulb shooting pustular roots into my fertile flesh. It had grown sensitive to pressure, but to gentle finger-stroking it still yielded a pleasant itch. Thus I was not quite alone.
A child strayed into the hut and stood at my bedside pondering me. It had no nose or ears and both upper and lower foreteeth jutted horizontally from its mouth. Patches of skin had peeled from its face, hands, and legs, revealing a pink inner self in poor imitation of European colouring. It stood there until its eyes adjusted to the gloom. I told it it was a dream and ordered it not to touch me, upon which it turned and left the hut on the balls of its feet. I crawled after it but it had vanished. I needed better food. Since my confinement began I had eaten nothing but broth without meat. My stomach grated, my bowels heaved fruitlessly. Face down in the dust I yelled for food. It was mid-afternoon, I could make out figures reclining in the shade of the huts across the stream. The brown-and-pink boy reappeared from behind the next hut. “Food!” I called out. “Tell your mother I must have good food!” He toddled off. I fell asleep in the dust. I awoke toward sunset. My sore was throbbing. From across the stream came angry ejaculations: “Left!” “That one!” “Mine!” Two men squatted opposite each other in the sun’s dying glow. Their arms tossed in all directions, their hands at one moment together, at the next stretched wide apart. They barked and laughed, they rolled from knees to heels and back again. An archaic Hottentot game, I decided. It was soon feeding time. Klawer brought me the witch-ẃoman’s soup. I demanded meat. He fetched dried meat. I tore into it like a dog.
There was no doubt of it, my stomach was not ready for strong fare. All night it contorted itself about the strings of chewed meat, and finally expelled them in acid gusts which ate into the delicate surface of my carbuncle. The oiliest wisp of wool in Klawer’s gentlest hand could no longer wring from it a tremor of pleasure. Instead there began a faint throbbing, a little heart in time with my big heart. I consulted with Klawer: what could he procure me that would soothe my stomach without reducing me to infant weakness? I needed gruel, he said, a gentle gruel of stamped grain simmered for hours over a low fire. I cursed the Hottentots for their improvidence. They cultivated no grain. What they offered in abundance, today of all days, was hippopotamus fat. Hunters had come back from the great river with sledsful of the part-cured flesh of a cow that had fallen into one of their pits. They had brought, too, roped feet upward in a sled, two hundred pounds of delicate living flesh, the calf which, watching its mother bleed to death on the stakes, had been caught unawares by the hunters. The women were at this minute pounding the calf with clubs in preparation for its slaughter: by breaking the minor blood vessels while its heart still beat they would lessen the drainage of blood from its already pallid flesh. Once the calf must have broken away from the women, for it came trotting from behind the huts with a laughing crowd in pursuit. It splashed into the stream and was allowed to stand there twitching and panting for a moment before it was prodded back to the slaughtering place. I longed for its liver or tongue roasted, but knew I could not stomach such elementary fare. So I sent Klawer to ensure that a little flesh without fat was kept back for broth. And by standing about during the carving up he did manage to procure scraps which, with the fat skimmed off and wild onion added, were to give me a wholesome soup, the first appetizing meal I had tasted in captivity and one which provoked no immediate rejection.
In high good humour I sent Klawer off to take part in the festivities and settled down in the doorway of my hut to listen, the central clearing of the camp being hidden from my sight. The melancholy air “Ho-ta ti-te se”, sung in unison by two women and punctuated with thuds of the big pestle, reached me through the dusk mingled with the twittering of birds in the trees. As it grew darker I began to see above the roofs the glare of the big woodfire. The singing stopped, and for a long time only a babble of shouting and laughter reached my ears. Then through the darkness came the sounds I had been listening for, tentative flutings on reedpipes and the thump of the wood-bow. The first round of feasting was over, there would now be pantomime and dancing. It would go on all night, there would be no respite until all those hundreds of pounds of hippopotamus and all the reserves of fermented milk and honey were gone. I was relieved to find myself growing bored and impatient with my situation. Boredom is a sentiment not available to the Hottentot: it is a sign of higher humanity. I must be on the mend. I stood up. There was a moment of vertigo, but I stood quite
easily. Holding my buttocks apart and resting frequently I walked to my bank of the stream, where I lay for a while watching the silhouettes against the great fire. Then I crossed the stream and moved among the huts, a ghost or a scraggy killjoy ancestor. I was detected at once. “He’s here! He’s here!” shouted a woman, and I was surrounded. The flutes tailed off. There was something like silence. They kept their distance. “I mean no harm”, I said. A woman began to wail in a high voice. There were spatters of laughter in the crowd and a slow rhythmic handclap emerged. A man pushed his way through. I recognized him: the oxrider. “You must go!” he said. “Go, go!” He waved his arm in the direction of the stream and advanced on me in some anger. I turned and went. My buttocks grated on each other but I could not afford a wrong gesture. The crowd parted and watched me, but for children who trotted backwards ahead of me making sucking noises and calling “Come, come!” I had an attack of vertigo, this time from the enraged blood that flooded my head, and had to stand for a moment with my hands on my knees.
The children stayed on their side of the stream. As I began to cross I felt a hand under my elbow. It was Jan Klawer, most ashamed. I ground my teeth and shook him off. The pipes had started up again in a stamping dance. Against the fire I could see the two slowly circling lines, first the line of men headed by the nine reed musicians for the nine-note scale, then the line of women. Three steps forward, two steps back went the men, their backs hunched, their knees and feet bent outward. The women advanced with tiny clockwork steps, their rumps high in the air and their hands lightly beating time. The song was the highly suggestive “Nama Dove”. The heady single-note wails of the flutes, into which the percussive quivers of the wood-bow broke with a hip-rhythm, the involutedness of the posture of the men, attuned behind their closed eyelids to quite private elaborations of melody and rhythm, the knowing irony of the women playing the tiny movements of their hands and feet against the massive stillness of their haunches, filled me with new anxiety, sensual terror. The dance drew its inspiration from the sexual preliminaries of the dove: the male fluffs out his feathers and pursues the female in a bobbing walk, the female trips a few inches ahead of him and pretends not to see. The dance prettily suggested this circling chase; but besides depicting the chase it also brought out what lay within it, two modes of sexuality, the one priestly and ecstatic, the other luxurious and urbane. Nothing would have relieved me more than for the rhythms to simplify themselves and the dancers to drop their pantomime and cavort in an honest sexual frenzy culminating in mass coitus. I have always enjoyed watching coitus, whether of animals or of slaves. Nothing human is alien to me. So overmastering my anxiety I continued to watch until a cool night breeze sent me back to my bed.
I awoke the next morning ravenously hungry. The fever and weakness had gone, all that was left was the carbuncle. I tested it by gently pressing and was rewarded with an acute access of pain and a slow detumescence. I longed for a mirror.
No Klawer came with food. I did not hesitate to cross the stream into the main camp: after such a debauch as last night’s the Hottentots would sleep all day. An enemy could have eradicated them.
The first hut I looked into contained strange sleepers. In the second I found my missing men. The Tamboer brothers lay nearest the door under the spread of a buffalo hide. They smiled gentle, boyish smiles at each other in their sleep. Between them lay a girl whose wide-open eyes were fixed on me. Her breasts had barely formed. They had caught her at the right age. Behind them in the gloom I glimpsed, as I backed out, more sleeping forms.
I explored my side of the stream too. The hut next to mine contained the old man, the chief I had visited. His jaw was bound up with a thong and his arms were crossed. I removed his covering and found his left leg between knee and groin swaddled tightly in a binding from which issued a smell of rot. His belly had been sewn shut.
The pink-and-brown child was urinating by the door of the next hut. He scuttled inside when he saw me, and reappeared clutching the apron of a noseless woman with a ladle in her hand. I greeted her. She opened her mouth wide and pointed into it. I shook my head. Out of her throat came a rasping sound. She began to advance on me. I turned on my heel and left. There was still no sign of Klawer. I returned to the Tamboer brothers’ hut and, overcoming a false sense of shame, entered. The boys were lying as before, the girl was still awake. I looked hard at her, uncertain whether she might not call out and embarrass me. She smiled back, presumably a smile of invitation, though I could hardly believe she was so simple-minded as to think I would share a bed with my servants and their trollop. So I ignored her and crept further into the hut. The next sleeper was Plaatje. His face too was peaceful, inconsistent with the anxious, fearful character I knew was his. The next sleeper was the missing Klawer. He slept with his arms clasped round the waist of a woman, a mountainous creature with sunken cheeks and hair reeking of fat. Nestled against her in turn was a child of perhaps five. I clenched Klawer’s shoulder in my talons and whispered in his ear. His eyelids flinched and his body contracted like an insect that has no defence but to pretend it is a lizard-turd. “Klawer!” my whisper roared in his ear. His eyes opened in full consciousness, cast one sidelong look at me, and settled like stones on the filthy nape of the woman. The first flush of exultation I had felt for weeks coursed through my veins. “Klawer!” I whispered, and he must surely have heard the laughter in my voice. “Where is my breakfast? I want my breakfast”.
He would not look at me, he would not talk, no doubt the sweat had begun to seep in his armpits. I prodded him in the rump. “Stand up, I am speaking to you! Where is my breakfast?”
Sighing he let go of the woman and knelt in the bed feeling for his clothes, a dejected wrinkled old man with a long drooping penis the colour of ash.
“Master! Excuse me, master!” It was Plaatje now speaking, Plaatje lying flat on his back with a hand under his head and speaking to me. “Why doesn’t master let us sleep?” His eyes were on mine. I clenched my lips in an expression he must have known and feared from the old days, but he did not quail. He was smiling a Hottentot smile. I did not know who else had awoken and was listening, but I could not afford to take my eyes off Plaatje. “We are tired, we went to bed late, we want to sleep. Master must let us sleep”. Long silence. “If master wants breakfast master must perhaps find it for himself”. I took one step toward him. On the second step I would have kicked. In the old days such a kick, catching him under the jawbone, would have wrenched every tendon in his neck from its mooring and snapped his neckbone too. But on my first step he whipped back the corner of his blanket. In the placid hand that lay beside his thigh was a knife. I could no longer afford to miss. Next time, I told myself, next time.
“Master is a sick man”. Plaatje was pushing it too far. “Master must lie down and get his strength back. Later, when we get up, we will send something to master. Master lives over there on the other side of the water, doesn’t master?”
“Come!” I said to Klawer, and strode out of the hut.
“What would master like us to send?” called Plaatje. “Would master like some tail?” The inside of the hut exploded into giggles and whoops, over which soared Plaatje’s voice: “Maybe we will send master some nice young tail!” Gusts of ribaldry sailed past me on my way out of the sleeping village.
I waited at my hut, and Klawer came as I knew he would. The habit of obedience is not easily broken. Abjectly he apologized for Plaatje: he did not know what he was doing, he was only showing off, he was only a boy, he was over-excited, he had drunk too much, these people were leading him into bad ways, and so on. He brought me biscuits, biscuits from my own biscuit-barrel, which the Hottentots had dipped into during their feasting. I was grateful for civilized food. “Who is the lady?” I asked; and, “You’re too old for that kind of thing, Klawer”. Nothing like a little humour to clear the air. Klawer slipped back into his old self, grinning and shuffling. There was no doubt about him. “Klawer”, I tol
d him, “we are leaving”. “Yes master”.
There were preparations to be made, one preparation in particular. I could not ride, indeed could not walk, should it ever come down to that, in my present condition. I must lance my carbuncle. So pocketing Klawer’s useful tufts I strolled upstream until bushes concealed me from the camp. Then I took off my trousers, propped my head against a rock, and, lying on the small of my back with knees in the air, scrupulously anointed my flaming jewel with damp wool. I was teased by my inability to see it. How large was it? Only eyes could be trusted, for my fingertips refused to distinguish between their own sensation and the sensation of the skin they touched, on one occasion reporting a mere pimple surrounded by acres of graded pain, on another a hill of pus rising to a delicate peak.